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dairy-free

after vanishing from the blogging world for the last couple of months I finally found the motivating to write again. I do have to admit I got a little lazy, but I needed some time off to regain my creative energy after an exhausting start of the year. So instead of blogging I moved houses, went on holidays and spent lots of fun nights with friends.

One of the most memoreable ones took place about three weeks ago when I went to the first “Schnippeldisko” of my life. The event was organized by Slow Food Youth Düsseldorf and intended to raise awareness for food waste. So my friends (read Amanda’s beautiful article about it) and I spent the night dancing, drinking and chopping heart-shaped potatoes, weird-looking radishes and bent carrots. The food came from a local farmer who explained to us it wasn’t perfect enough for supermarkets, so it would normally have to get thrown out – a thing that is just absolutely outrageous and sad, especially if you take into account that nothing was wrong with the food apart from its shape. The “Schnippel-dinner” proved that: The ingredients were used to cook delicious soup, a yummy side salad and a fruit salad as dessert for everyone.

As a result of this night I’m trying to avoid food waste even harder which led to some crazy combinations on my dinner table. For example I’ve been eating nothing but asparagus for dinner for the last five days (asparagus with hollandaise sauce turned into asparagus soup turned into asparagus pasta sauce turned into asparagus sauce for German dumplings) – and suddenly my creativity is back 🙂 So before I vanish from the blogging sphere again (I decided not to overdo it, so I won’t post as regularly as I used to), I want to share an easy summer recipe with you – gazpacho soup.

It’s a great leftover recipe for using up old bread and it’s really super-quick. For 4-6 portions use:

1-2 stale bread rolls or slices of bread

5 medium-sized tomatos

1 green or yellow bell pepper

2/3 of a cucumber

2 cloves of garlic

1 tsp of lemon juice

1 TS of balsamic vinegar

salt

black pepper

parsley for decoration

optional: 1 tsp of sugar (only if the soup is too sour for you)

Soak the bread in a bit of water and let it get all soaked up for about 20 to 45 minutes (depending on how stale it is). Pour hot water over the tomatos and peel them. Then chop everything up and blend it together. Add the bread and blend again. Use tomato cubes and parsley for decoration.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away – I don’t know if this proverb actually counts if you turn your apple into cake, but let’s give it a try. So here’s the first recipe from last weekend’s cake invasion extravaganza: apple crumble cake with cranberries. Thanks to my dad’s gardening efforts I’ve still got plenty of apples at home. So here’s all you need to be happy on a cold, rainy day:

Get started: Mix the sugar and the margarine with a handheld mixer until it gets a bit bigger (Make sure that the margarine is not too hard, it works a lot better if you take it out of the fridge an hour before starting your preparation). Then add egg replacer, flour, baking powder, almond milk, sugar, vanilla sugar, cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Put it in a springform pan and preheat the oven (set it to 200 degrees celsius).

Put the apple sauce on top of the cake base and put the apple slices and cranberries on top (I placed them on the cake base in a circle, but that’s totally up to you). After that mix the rest of the crumble ingredients and put little bits of it on top of the cake.

Put your cake on the middle rack of your oven and bake it for about 40-50 minutes. Let it cool down a bit and sprinkle 1 TS of icing sugar on top. Serve it with coconut cream!

I have to admit: I’m not afraid of carbs. Every morning a enjoy a good bread roll from the bakery or a slice of homemade bread. I just love bread in all kinds of shapes and colours (Yes, even the “bad” white bread) – and fortunately I live in a country with a big baking tradition (If you want to read more about, check out bakingmywaythroughgermany. I love this blog). But although I enjoy a little “breadfast” almost every day, I still end up with leftovers. Sometimes I just bake too much, sometimes I buy too many rolls and sometimes bread just gets hard. So what to do with all the old bread? Make French Toast! As Frl. Moonstruck’s tasty breakfast-blogging-event happens to close tomorrow, I’m gonna use the opportunity and submit my recipe.

So what do you need? First of all: loads of old bread. It doesn’t matter if it’s white or dark bread, you might just have to soak the dark bread a bit longer to get it soft.

How to get started? Chop the bread in little slices or triangles. If it’s too hard already, then soak it first and turn it into little bread balls later.

Prepare your soaking mix (For soaking 2 big bread rolls or about 6 normal slices of bread. Otherwise just make more 🙂 ) I managed to make the batter without using any plastic packaging. You need:

120 g of flour (white or wholemeal)

220 ml of soy milk (in Germany you can get soy milk in glass bottles as well. I found them at SuperBioMarkt)

Soak your bread in the mix until it becomes soft. After that all you have to do is fry it up in a pan until it gets a nice brown crust. Serve it with icing sugar. As it’s apple season at the moment I made apple dessert the other day and served it with the French toast.

before

after

A handful of blueberries added some more colour to my “breadfast”. Tastes better than pancakes!

French Toast

What do you do with old bread? Would love to find more ways to use up old bread.